The Times of India is a rag that literally accepts bribes for positive coverage; sensationalist garbage is their bread and butter. But it’s worse than that this time: this story is over two years out-of-date.

The KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) announced on the 20th that during the ‘2023 KSTAR Plasma Campaign’ conducted from December of last year to February of this year, it achieved a 48-second operation of ultra-high-temperature plasma at an ion temperature of 100 million degrees and a record 102-second operation in high-confinement mode (H-mode).

This happened back in 2024. Here’s a paper.

ahem

I could go look this up, but frankly, it’s your job now: elaborate, please.

I’ll do you one better:

Imagine you’re born and you’re a crab who parasitizes the rectum of one of these.

Ah, yeah, I guess I was forgetting about promoting. Agreed that white definitely wins then.

Okay, but now I want to see what the end state looks like for optimal (or near-optimal) play between both participants in this fucked-up chess variant.

I mean I definitely think it’d hurt him, but agreed on no crushing.

My problem is the spider sense logic. Even within the context of a joke, spider sense is clearly heavily temporal. I don’t think, for example, that Spider-Man is constantly tingling over the eventual chronic illness he’s going to succumb to in 50 years or whatever.

By the time his spider sense is going off, you’re minutes if not seconds from finishing the compute and achieving the result anyway.

My favorite way to slap an English speaker in the face with the silly irregularities of English pronunciation is to show them the 1920 poem The Chaos.

After the proposed Operation Whalefall was ruled out.

“Pterodactyls are fish” seems disingenuous to insert when two of the previous ones are about pedantic taxonomy facts (which are true). “Fish” are paraphyletic and thus not an actual taxon, but as a practical group, it’s all non-tetrapod vertebrates – and order Pterosauria are decidedly tetrapods.

It’s trying to be pedantic in a cheeky way but just ends up being wrong.

Edit: Just so I balance this out, though, anyone wanting to be humorously pedantic about aquatic taxonomy should check out WoRMS (the World Register of Marine Species). They’ve always been, to me, the most up-to-date source on the taxonomy of marine, freshwater, and brackish biota short of reading the actual scientific literature.

Why did you all think Japan hates them so much?

But look at all the Prdecessors it has!

Lemon-dealing DoorDashers.

Edit: I forgot to mention this is satire. This isn’t a real case that happened.

others are saying

Others are wrong. Please see the Reddit post where it shows the topmost portion. It has only three edges. It’s open-topped.

As for the methyl and CH3 groups, that’s where, as noted, I begin to suspect erroneous human pattern recognition, but I’d also see a universe where those were too cumbersome to incorporate as elements of a functional shelf (unlike the carbonyl group, albeit that’s only one layer) and thus were ignored.

Damn, it looked for a second like that US Marshal on the right was wearing a shockingly ahead-of-its-time earring on his left ear.

I didn’t know anything about this show going into this and probably should’ve checked, but apparently this god among twinks shown in the OP is an inventor, so that explanation would track too.

Here’s a good 2021 article from Emory University Magazine discussing Hood and his application.

Edit: My favorite paragraph:

In one of the peculiarities of the segregation era, the state of Georgia paid Black students the difference in cost to attend school out of state. “If it cost $500 a year to go to school in Georgia, and it cost $1,000 to go up there, they would pay the extra $500 so I would pay the same thing,” Hood explains. “And I would come home each semester, go down to the capitol, and reluctantly they would give me this check to take back to Loyola University.”

A Reddit thread from April 2017 (possibly its first appearance?) does try to critique it. Notably, for example, there’s a hexagon instead of a pentagon at the base, and the top shelf has three edges instead of four.

It’s easy enough to explain this away given that you have to make it a shelf and therefore level, but humans have recognized more credible-seeming patterns before (I can’t cite them because I can’t remember exactly what they were, but I’ve seen some really funny ones in the Bible), so it also seems plausible that people are just pattern-recognizing. This is professionally animated, so time went into this, and you could imagine, for example, that the bulb hanging down from one of the shelves wouldn’t have have been included since it changes the structure of the compound (but then you could equally argue that the shelf was there and some other animator put a light bulb on it).

All-in-all: eh. Seems neat as a harmless fan conspiracy.

I mean ehhhhh. It’s not impossible, but LSD definitely seems the most probable if we assume this is a chemistry reference (the most compelling alternative idea to LSD imo is that it could be erroneous human pattern recognition). LSD is synthesized from ergotamine and has an ergoline structure, and of the family of lysergamides that look similar, LSD clearly fits the best given its popularity and the way the carbonyl group lines up with that bit of shelf going off to the top-right.

(Please take that with a grain of salt; I’m not a chemist.)

From her Wikipedia article:

The device was completed in 1986 after Bath conducted research on lasers in Berlin and patented in 1988, making her the first African-American woman to receive a patent for a medical purpose.

This bit of trivia is actually what surprised me most. “A medical purpose” is so general, and 1988 is so late by comparison.

So a no-name journal (Journal of Psychology and Brain Science) from a no-name publisher (Hapres) that has a prominent, red “Total Views” count at the side.

Yeah.